


Salvation

by Khrysoprase



Category: Shazam! (2019), Yume Nikki | Dream Diary
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempted Suicide, Childhood Friends, Crossover, F/M, First Crush, Food, Gen, Mentions of dead parents, Nobody Dies, Pedro Needed A Backstory, but it's not the focus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 22:58:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18398078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khrysoprase/pseuds/Khrysoprase
Summary: Pedro was in a foster home before he came to live with Victor and Rosa, and back then, he only had two things that kept him going: a dysfunctional relationship with food, and a best friend who the system separated him from forcibly.Fortunately, superheroes always save the day and get the girl.





	Salvation

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the crossover no one wanted with the backstory for Pedro none of you were asking for! Look, I'm intrigued by his character + he seems like a nice guy. We need more fics about the Shazamily.

When Pedro was in his first foster home, there wasn’t enough food.

After six foster homes in the same area in Philadelphia got shut down for abusing the kids, everyone was forced into other available homes. Some of those weren’t really ready to take on more children, but they did so out of the goodness of their hearts. Pedro knew his first foster parents were doing their best. Their biological son brought them home food from the bakery he worked at, too. They were all trying their hardest to stretch their budget as far as it could go for their twelve foster kids, and he knew that, and he felt guilty for being hungrier than the rest.

Back when his parents had been alive, they’d always brought home treats. They showered him with affection, with candy, with comfort food to soften the blow of a bad grade. He missed them. He missed them every time his stomach growled. At night, shoving his face into his pillow, Pedro tried not to think about how his mom would put a tiny pack of mini-donuts on his dresser to surprise him when he woke up sometimes. He wasn’t sure if he missed the food or her tiptoeing into his room, her long hair catching the dim light. His mom had the longest hair he’d ever seen. Unbraided, it hit her knees.

That was why he hung out with Madotsuki, at first. She was just a stranger, another foster kid, but her hair hit her knees even in braids – she always wore her brown hair in two, like her mother had done her hair before her death, she later explained to him – and she was always quietly seeking him out to sit with him. When he offered it to her, she’d take an earbud from him. They’d listen to music together, sometimes with her stimming by tapping her fingers to the music, sometimes with him leaning against her shoulder. It wasn’t romantic. Or at least, he was pretty sure it wasn’t romantic on her end; it was hard to read her, in part due to her subdued expressions, partly because of her mute episodes.

The other kids thought she was weird. That was okay, though, since they thought he was a fat slob. What did they know? They had no idea how his family or his life used to be and he was pretty sure nobody had ever asked Madotsuki about her parents, either. With twelve kids in the house, it was easy to get overlooked.

He felt like he could disappear without anybody else noticing besides her. Nobody else asked him how his day was or if he was okay. Half the time it felt like other kids only noticed him to tell him to stop eating. Pedro tuned it out with music as best he could, but it hurt to be seen as a burden by all these other kids who’d come from way worse situations than he had. He was making everyone miserable. He wanted to disappear.

One night, Madotsuki crept into his room. He woke up at the familiar sound of someone tiptoeing across the floor. She left without a word.

There was an Almond Joy in his bag the next morning. He could’ve cried if he wasn’t sure the other kids would give him hell for it. Instead he pulled her into a hug, ignoring the snickering of his fellow foster kids about how he had a girlfriend, and after a moment, she hugged him back.

They walked to school together, earbuds one apiece, wires dangling between them precariously. Bit by bit, they talked. He told her about the drive-by shooting, the gas station, his parents never making it home. She told him about the car crash, the drunk driver, hearing her sister Monoe scream, waking up in a hospital to be told only she’d made it. Sometimes when they walked by a gas station she’d grab his hand. He grabbed hers when a car screeched to a halt and she locked up. If anybody had asked – they didn’t, no one cared – he’d have said it was all he needed. He didn’t need to be popular. He just needed to know somebody cared. Pedro wished his mom could’ve met Madotsuki. She’d have given her chocolate and told her she was too skinny, adopted her in spirit if nothing else. His dad would’ve given him meaningful looks and a talk about girls.

The absence of these things weighed on him. His stomach growled. He was almost happy, but not quite.

Madotsuki took his messenger bag, walked into a grocery store, and sleepily slipped in and out of the aisles. She returned laden down with treats. The only thing she’d gotten for herself was a notebook to record her dreams in, a quirk he didn’t get but didn’t criticize. He was too busy freaking out.

“Oh my _God_ , Mads, you can’t just steal stuff!” he hissed at her, when they were out of anyone’s earshot. It was a rainy day in Philadelphia, and every color was washed out except for the glimmering wrapping of the candy bars. “What if you get caught?”

She shrugged her skinny shoulders and handed him a Butterfinger. “I needed to pay you back. For the knife.”

That was the other major quirk of hers. She was from one of the foster homes that had been shut down, one of the ones facing abuse charges, so she slept with a knife under her pillow. When she’d gone to a school without security guards, she had brought it to school in her skirt pocket. Pedro didn’t judge. Or he tried not to, anyway. She hadn’t ever hurt anybody. He couldn’t really picture anyone being threatened by this tiny, rail thin girl who rarely spoke and never got angry. So when his foster parents asked him if he knew where one of their kitchen knives had gone, he said no, he had no idea. He didn’t get why Madotsuki carried it around on the weekends or outside when she never used it, he couldn’t imagine wanting to sleep with it, but he trusted her enough to let her keep it.

He needed food. She needed safety. They provided for each other.

In a better world, fate would have let them stay together in this perfect arrangement, forever.

When their foster home got shut down for negligence – not providing enough food was very illegal, and some other kid had tattled to CPS – she had cried and cried. She hung onto him like he was her lifeline. Nobody noticed. As they waited for their new foster parents to pick them up, she silently sobbed and he cranked his music, trying to drown out his thoughts. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair. Everything stopped feeling real, except for her head on his shoulder, his arm around her waist, and maybe he had been in love and he’d never known it, because his heart was breaking.

Her new foster parents thought he was a bad influence. He wasn’t sure if they found out about the knife or the stealing. Ultimately, the effect was the same: they cut him off from her, and he slipped into himself more and more. He didn’t have the heart to delete her Japanese music off of his iPod, even the overly sugary stuff, even after Eugene gave him a confused look when he saw it. He couldn’t explain it. It hurt too much. Sometimes he wished he could talk to someone, but they wouldn’t understand any of it. Pedro didn’t understand it, either. When had he turned into the kind of guy who listened to music and got sad? That was way more emo than he ever wanted to be.

Maybe it wasn’t the best use of his superpowers, and maybe he wasn’t worthy like the Wizard guy had wanted, but the night after they defeated a supervillain (how was this his life?) he went looking for her. He was pretty sure what neighborhood she was in, thanks to a little help from Eugene, so it wasn’t like he was going to comb through all of Philly to find her. He just wanted to… something. Say hi, or tell her thank you because he’d seen how lonely Billy was and realized how lucky he was to have had her by his side for two years at that foster home. Or he could just show off his powers, get her to smile. She’d want to sketch him, probably. He hoped she was okay.

She wasn’t. He found her standing on the roof of her apartment building, long braids caught in the wind as she slipped one leg over the railing, then the other. She looked down.

And then she jumped.

He caught her.

Madotsuki weighed almost nothing. She shivered violently in the cold. He would learn later that her latest foster parents had forgotten to pay for the heat. Pedro landed gently, but was reluctant to put her on the ground with how hard she was shaking. She had on the same shirt she wore the day he left. Without a second thought, he muttered, “Shazam.” When the weight of her hit his normal self, he nearly dropped her. It didn’t matter. Madotsuki saw Pedro and her tears stopped… for a second, before she wrapped her arms around his neck and cried into his shoulder until she ran out of tears. He tried not to break down himself. _If I was a second slower, I…_ Pedro thought of the people Sivana had thrown out of windows, of how the bodies had to be identified through dental records. He thought about Madotsuki’s parents, her sister, dead and gone and no foster family to replace them the way Victor, Rosa, Mary and Darla had filed those roles for him.

There was really no way to explain himself, or ask her to explain herself, so he looked at her, held out an earbud from his pocket, and asked her the only question he could think of.

“Wanna get something to eat?”

**Author's Note:**

> The game Yume Nikki ends with Madotsuki dying via jumping. I'm still bitter ten years after first playing the game.


End file.
